Cal Newport

"I watched The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne Johnson. Dwayne Johnson was great. The filming was in that really confident impressive standard safety style naturalism which I think is really impressive alterior film making."

"I read The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer. This is a book that was basically like invented in a lab to be exactly what I want to read. The rise of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. Obviously, I love this book."

"We also watched Song Blue, which was starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson about dramatizing the life of a Neil Diamond husband wife tribute band from the 90s and 2000s. It was fine."

"I've been teaching with my iPad, so I'm used to this now"

"Earlier this year, I switched to a new task management app. It's called Things 3. I spent $10 to buy a copy for my phone and then I spent $50 to buy a copy for my Mac."

"I'm not right now. There are certain things I do where Trello is the right tool. In particular, if it's a complicated project with multiple people involved, Trello is the right tool."

"You got to watch John Ford. You got to watch The Searchers."

"Watch Citizen Kane. I'm obsessed with this movie. Wells invented like all of these techniques that now we're used to from sophisticated movies. They weren't in the movies before it. He just innovated the cinematography."

"You gotta watch The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. I think that's my favorite Clint Eastwood from that period."

"You got to watch Bonnie and Clyde. Read about Bonnie and Clyde before you watch it. This introduced new Hollywood. This was bringing like a European style personal filmmaking to Hollywood."

"If I'm watching a classic, I always search to see if there's an article written about it for American Cinematography magazine. A lot of movies will have these articles where the cinematographer writes a long essay about how they shot the movie, what they were thinking about, the techniques they introduced."

"You got to watch Apocalypse Now. There's such great beautiful remasterings of that movie. It's visually beautiful. That's a fantastic movie."

"Duvall Godfather one and two. It's out of favor to say that's good. It's a great movie and he's great in that."

"You gotta watch Vertigo by Hitchcock."

"If you want something that's in the theaters now, the best thing I've seen recently is Anora. It's one of the Safdie Brothers. Fantastic kind of commentary on the American experience, on capitalism, on the tension between ambition and family."

"I think Zone of Interest is a masterpiece. There's a lot about that movie. It's so original the way that it was crafted and constructed. I saw it in the theater. I think it's fantastic."

"Dunkirk I think is a masterpiece of writing and filmmaking."

"You got to watch Jaws, arguably like the platonically perfect movie of the 20th century."

"Consider watching M, the German Fritz Lang movie. So atmospheric. It's kind of touches on German expressionism. So many innovations in it. It's actually a really good movie."

"at the end of your routine, you sit down and you draw out your time block plan for the day and then you start"

"Or you can have a new concept which I'm introducing for 2026 which is the idea of a phone zone. I heard this from uh a listener suggested this and I thought it was a great idea. You can have a much broader amount of time each day in which you can say uh I'm not dedicating this just to communicating but my phone's going to be on."

"I wrote this book during the pandemic. I'm going to recommend it. Uh, it's called A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. As you'll see, it was one of the best non-fiction books of the year, Jesse, as selected by Amazon. It was also a New York Times bestselling book."

"Or have office hours, which I talk about commonly, a set time each day where your door is open, your phone is on, you have a Zoom room open, and you can just say, 'Hey, um, come by my next office hours. will chat about this.'"

"Well, docket clearing meetings, you can think of it as a collaborative office hours. Two or three times a week, your team gets together to say, 'What uh what open loops, new tasks, new ideas, things we have to tackle have come up since our last docket clearing meeting.'"

"I found a Vanity Fair article about exactly this phenomenon. I'm a little bit curious about what's going on so let's look at this."

"I like this ad of James Cameron wearing Rolex. Why is James... If you're James Cameron, why are you agreeing to do a Rolex ad?"

"In 2002, even as two nearly three-hour Lord of the Ring movies dominated theaters, the average length of the top 20 box office performers was a breezy 1 hour and 59 minutes."

"The greatest movie of that decade came out in 2002 which was the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads."

"My wife and I started last night Train Dreams, which is one of the best picture nominees. It actually caught our attention that it was an hour 47 so this must be a fact like that felt short notably short."

"But if you have one click away from those horizontal carousels on Netflix like my god there could be something better."

"These sort of AI tools for programming have been big since before ChatGPT came out."

"We go way back we go to Cursor these sort of pre-ChatGPT products."

"Claude Code switching from Opus to Sonnet. There's like these little things got just good."

"You have to show the people the audience right off the bat this is what's coming and you show quick clips of the biggest exciting things that's going to happen. And so like a Mr. Beast video, if they're crashing a train into something, you'll see the train crashing."

"Remember the various YouTube people we work with have told us like oh the thing is like watch a Mr. Beast video you'll see this."

"Have you noticed that in TV programs such as The Great Pottery Throwdown, when the program finishes, they say next time and then they show you the highlights of the next show."

"We are having Anna on who is the researcher who wrote Dopamine Nation, the world's leading expert on dopamine."

"Chat GPT was made on from the very beginning the last half decade"

"It's an essay that's been going around on X that went viral"

"The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps"

"GPT53 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic"

"I finished a book called Attensify. It's a collective of academics who are thinking and writing about attention and the attack on attention from digital devices. It's smart actually. It's smart writing."

"I found a Lincoln Preston and Child's Gideon Crew thriller called The Lost Island, which takes place in the Caribbean. It's a little nuts. The structure was not great. Like it was very disjointed."

"There's actually a term of art for the capability that phones are degrading. The term is cognitive patience. This was coined by the reading researcher Maryanne Wolf."

"Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic."

"Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic."

"there's a lot of morning routine content on YouTube right now and the audience of YouTube heavily skews towards young people"

"let me go to email and Slack first because again, this is more engaging"

"We have become trained as consumers that when we see video content at the level of quality of something like MasterClass or Netflix, we say, 'Okay, that's something I'll pay for.'"

"But if you move down just a little bit to the level below, like these really good video podcasts where people have nice DSLR cameras and some diffused light and it looks pretty good, people say, 'No, no, no. That is for free platforms like YouTube.'"

"A book I finished last week is I finished reading Richard Elliott's book, The Hidden Book in the Bible. Richard Elliott's one of my favorite biblical scholars."

"It actually came out of an early 2000's era website called collegehumor.com. It costs $6.99 a month. You can watch it on your devices or on an app on your TV just like you would Netflix."

"We had Brad Stulberg on and he was talking about his new book, The Way of Excellence."

"In the book world, you might think about like Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art."

"Mel Robbins's new book, The Let Them Theory. These are psychological self-help books."

"I keep on thinking about this with your episode earlier a couple weeks ago about Substack too."

"In the world of books you might think about like James Clear's Atomic Habits. It's like really specific advice for how you make progress on habits."

"You have a Zoom room open, and you can just say, 'Hey, um, come by my next office hours. will chat about this.'"

"They gather trillions of observations from people using that software. They anonymize them and analyze them and you get this snapshot of how are actual knowledge workers using their computer."

"Over the weekend usage of WXP. So, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, the non-communication tools overtakes Teams messages as employees finally carve out time for uninterrupted focus work."

"Over the weekend usage of WXP. So, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, the non-communication tools overtakes Teams messages as employees finally carve out time for uninterrupted focus work."

"Over the weekend usage of WXP. So, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, the non-communication tools overtakes Teams messages as employees finally carve out time for uninterrupted focus work."

"One of their big sources of data points is the Microsoft 365 software suites like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, you know, those tools that so many people use to work on their computers."

"something like 170 million times on X alone"

"I just finished Michael Barrier's biography of Walt Disney called The Animated Man, which was the second major biography of Walt Disney I've read"

"we had Brad Stolberg on and he was talking about his new book, The Way of Excellence"

"Distraction in the workplace is driven by workplace communication tools like email and Slack."

"We still hear these arguments today, that if we don't let 12-year-olds in Australia be on TikTok, they won't be able to know about world events."

"I have to go into this cold plunge to stimulate exactly this type of response or whatever it is"

"The average worker receives 153 Teams messages. That's like Slack, Instant Messenger, per weekday. That adds up to 270 interruptions a day when you only have about 480 total minutes to work with."

"That's like Slack, Instant Messenger, per weekday. That adds up to 270 interruptions a day when you only have about 480 total minutes to work with."

"Is anything really all that terrible going to happen if I look at TikTok for a little bit during my bus commute home?"

"if you read my newsletter today and get at calNewport.com"

"I wrote an article back in January for the New Yorker about this"

"Here is my technique that I use. I'm going to give it to you now for the first time. Never talked about it before. I call it the 30-minute rule. You never go more than 30 minutes without stopping to read something about the movie."

"Hey, so I recently filmed a course for MasterClass. Now, this was a really interesting experience and I think the final product was great and you can check it out at masterclass.com/calnewport."

"in my second book, which was almost as popular as the Da Vinci Code, how to become a straight A student. Actually, here's a connection to the Da Vinci Code."

"That's almost as many copies as I've sold of How to Become a High School Superstar."

"This is something I really came to understand when working on my last book, Slow Productivity. The connection between workload and messages."

"By the way, notice how all these people have they don't want to use my term deep work. So, everyone uses the phrase focus work, which is I guess good or bad."

"That's like almost as many copies as I've sold of How to Become a High School Superstar"

"I like AG1 because I don't have time to try to keep up with a cabinet full of various pills and concoctions and supplements. I can make sure I'm getting the stuff that I need in the highest possible quality with the simplest possible habit of just one scoop, one glass of water, drink it."

"I'm a grass-fed beef guy, and it's hard to find the good stuff in the store, but with ButcherBox, I can just click a few buttons, specify my preferences, and boom, that beef shows up right at my door."

"I have all three products, so I can tell you from experience, this routine is simple and it's fast, but it works. Especially the moisturizing."

"I'm only exaggerating a little bit when I say between my wife and I, I think we own basically every product that Cozy Earth sells. I'm talking like their bamboo sheets. It's the most comfortable I've ever slept in."

"Look, if we ever start selling products on this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use. It will be Shopify."

"This is why you need Grammarly, one of the show's longest running sponsors. One of these features I especially appreciate is the tool's ability to detect the tone of your message and help you automatically adjust it."

"This is why I love Pipedrive, a fantastic sales CRM system for small and medium-sized businesses. If you're starting a business or working in sales, I highly recommend you check out Pipedrive."

"You need One Password. One Password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit, weak passwords."

"if you need to sell something, you need Shopify. We ever start selling products on this show, I know exactly what product we will use, what service we'll use that is, and it is Shopify."

"BetterHelp makes it easy to find and meet therapist online. They do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals"

"if we ever start selling products here related to the show, Jesse, I know exactly what we're going to use to do that. It's going to be Shopify"

"I have them. I use these products. I, again, I mentioned I really like the cleanser. It foams and it makes me feel somehow"

"how much I like my rag and bone jeans. Their infused denim feels soft and it's broken in and it's quality. Like you could wear these for years on end without wearing them out"